Find a node’s path in an XML document using Ruby, Nokogiri and Pry.
Agile Testing Days 2023 – A Summary
Day ‘0’: Tutorial & Evening Keynote
Note: I denote this as day zero since the conference starts counting the conference days, with ‘day one’ being the first day after the tutorial day.
As every year, the Agile Testing Days start with a tutorial day. I chose ‘Breaking into AI and Machine Learning’ by Tariq King. The tutorial followed a top-down approach. We did not have to (re-) learn linear algebra and the like before getting started. Instead, after a brief introduction to the topic, we could work on an example task: Classifying irises. A CSV file containing typical attributes of various flower species was used to create a model that could classify a flower as one of the species the model was trained on. Tariq introduced this as the ‘Hello world of AI’.
We saw how overfitting a model can cause issues when a model is used with new data it wasn’t trained on. This happens when the model matches the test data (nearly) perfectly, which usually causes larger misclassifications when new data is put into the model.
We also learned how models can be trained on images to classify them. This is the next step since it requires processing much more data.
Then ChatGPT was introduced. While I am still a bit sceptical about some of its output since it’s known to (for example) ‘hallucinate’ citations for scientific papers. Yet, I am impressed with what can be achieved when it’s provided with enough data and prompts tuned to its needs.
In the first keynote, Maaike Brinkhof wrapped the experiences in her software testing career in the story of a role-playing game. In this setting, she met increasingly hard-to-conquer ‘bosses’. Inspiring, entertaining – and providing input for the following keynotes. In other words, It opened my mind for the conference to come.
Day 1 – No Overnight Sucess & Sociocracy
In the day’s first keynote, Kristel Kruustuk presented her thoughts about ‘10x Software Testing‘. My takeaway was this: You don’t become a ’10× tester’ overnight. Instead, it requires persistence and regular training. This matched nicely with my personal experience and is linked to one of my sessions this year.
The next session I attended was CraigRisi’s ‘Becoming an Open Sourcerer‘. He explained what teams should consider when they use open-source software. He also discussed the advantages and potential disadvantages of using open-source software. Finally, we learned about contributing to open-source projects. While contributing code changes is likely the most common way to contribute, providing documentation is another essential aspect, as are providing and improving bug reports and even (automated) tests.
The next keynote, ‘Could Agile Testers Help Debug Management?‘ by John Buck, was about debugging organisations. I particularly like his explanation of consent:
Consent means “Good enough for now, safe enough to try”
John Buck, Agile Testing Days 2023
As a tester, I’m unsure how to use this to debug management, and I will admit that I haven’t tried it yet.
Day 2 – Workshop & Infotainment
I missed the first keynote of the day since the next scheduled time slot included my workshop ‘Fun with U̡̟ͩ̊̏ͬͯni͑c͐̀͢od̲̎ͅḕ̶̩͙͆‘. Much to my pleasure, it was well attended, and folks were surprised at how bad some software is with processing Unicode. As Maaike tweeted:
Or, as Elizabeth Zagroba puts it:
After collecting my workshop material and winding down, I attended the keynote ‘Everyone is a Leader‘ by Zuzi Šochová. I liked how easy it was to follow along and the message that everyone can be a leader – at some time, for some topic. Leadership doesn’t have to be assigned but can be assumed temporarily when it makes sense.
The following two keynotes were mindblowing! Dr. Rochelle Carr requested the audience to ‘MOVE THAT WALL‘. This talk was loud and inspiring and made me think about which walls I have that I may want to move – or tear down entirely.
‘Don’t go breaking my code‘, by Lena Nyström & Samuel Nitsche, was a keynote in a musical or rock opera format: Loud, entertaining, and fun. It also explained where and why testers and developers have different points of view. Not only that, they also demonstrated ways to get along with each other better.
I ended the day by spending time at the Agile Testing Days Book Fair, organised by Tobias Geyer and Maik Nogens. Thankfully, I got the books I was looking for: Zuzi Šochvá’s ’The Agile Leader’ and John Buck’s ‘We The People’. They were even kind enough to sign the books for me. Thank you!
Day 3 – Conflict Resolution, Micropowers & Judgment Day
In the morning keynote ‘A Fighting Chance – Learning the Art of Conflict Resolution‘, Alex Schladebeck presented pitfalls to avoid when dealing with conflict and good ways to deal with them. Planned as a pair keynote, the second speaker, Sophie Küster, couldn’t be at the conference. Sophie, you were missed, and we all hope you’re back next year! My key takeaway: Noticing that someone perceives a conflict goes a long way to mitigating it. – Especially if the affected parties know about the pitfalls, such as saying, ‘You always/never do XY’.
After this, Eveline Moolenaars and I prepared our talk ‘Micropowers: Learn to Speak Up and Be Heard‘. This was about our shared experience of recovering from cancer and its treatment and how that helped us to start asking for help – and helping others. We found the term ‘superpower’ intimidating and came up with the term ‘micropower’. We defined this as an ability one can trust that helps to act when we see things that should be changed.
In the morning keynote, ’A Fighting Chance – Learning the Art of Conflict Resolution’, Alex Schladebeck presented pitfalls to avoid when facing conflicts and good ways to deal with them. Planned as a pair keynote, the second speaker, Sophie Küster, couldn’t be at the conference. Sophie, you were missed, and we all hope you’re back next year! My takeaway: Noticing that someone perceives a conflict goes a long way to mitigating it. – Especially if the affected parties know about the pitfalls, such as saying, ‘You always/never do XYZ’.
After this, Eveline Moolenaars and I prepared our talk ‘Micropowers: Learn to Speak Up and Be Heard’. This was about our shared experience of recovering from cancer and its treatment and how that helped us to start asking for help – and helping others. We found the term ‘superpowers’ intimidating and came up with the word ‘micropower’. We defined this as an ability one can trust that helps to act when we see things that should be changed.
The keynote ‘Wait! That’s Not Tested’ by Heather Reid introduced the idea that not all things need to be tested. We need to consider time, cost and risk when testing software. And since there is never enough time to test everything anyway, we must make bets. This connects nicely to John Buck’s definition of consent: ‘Good enough for now, safe enough to try’.
The keynote, ‘The Rise of Generative AI: Judgment Day’ by Tariq King, was the perfect ending to the official program since it nicely connected to my tutorial day. He presented content (paintings and music) in pairs: One an original from a human artis, the other one created by AI is the style of that artist. The audience was tasked to tell which one was the original and which one the ‘copy’. – I found it shocking that we, the audience, did not perform particularly well.
My overall impression of the Agile Testing Days: It was a very well-planned conference, with sessions that connected ideas and concepts. I am already looking forward to Agile Testing Days 2024 – and have many ideas for proposals already.
Thank you to everyone I have met and talked with this year. I hope to see you again in 2024.
Reloading CSS in a Rails app automatically
Another installment of a #NoteToSelf.
To illustrate the topic of a workshop I’m preparing, I wrote a small Rails (7.1.1) app that uses Tailwind CSS.
While preparing the application, I wanted to tailor the CSS of buttons, tables, etc. and wondered why the layout didn’t change when I edited the CSS classes of HTML elements. While the information about the formatting was present in the HTML displayed, it did not affect how the page looked.
As an example, take this HTML snippet:
<h1 class="font-bold text-4xl text-green-800">New submitter</h1>
I expected the h1 tag to be displayed in a light font weight. After changing the tag to
<h1 class="font-bold text-4xl text-red-800">New submitter</h1>
I expected the text to be red, and it wasn’t.
It took some searching to figure out that in config/environments/development.rb, I had to add a set config.assets.debug to true:
config.assets.debug = true
After adding this line and restarting the Rails server, changes to the layout were displayed immediately. Yay! 😃
Details about this setting are documented at https://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#turning-source-maps-on.
Write Meaningful Error Messages in Automated Tests
Here’s a tip: Write your automated tests with the failure in mind. Especially, consider a future maintainer who may need a useful error message.
This can help when the test fails in the future (and it probably will). A descriptive message helps understand the technical issue you’re looking at and will ideally guide you to finding a solution.
Let’s look at some examples that leave something to be desired. These messages may be true, but don’t help to understand the underlying problem:
Expected true, but got falseThe result message is malformedfail
Yes, I have seen these or very similar messages, that are rather useless.
Imagine how much more helpful, the following messages are:
Expected condition XY to be true in context AB of object OThe message ‘<output the actual message>’, is malformed and cannot be processed furtherGot <actual result> instead of <expected_result> when processing XY
These improved messages can guide you, help you remember the context and figure out the underlying issue when the test fails.
I find that this improvement shortens the time spent with failure analysis. It makes my days more productive because I get a message that tells me about the context where thing went wrong.
Do you have similar ideas about how to improve (automated) tests?
I’d love to hear about them.
Why I think We Can Do better Than asking ‘Why’
The other day I read this (German toot) on Mastodon (This toot apparently has ‘timed out’ by now. My answer is still available on Mastodon, though → Stephan: “@Minnasophie@troet.cafe @wandklex@mastodon.art Da…” – Software development is a social activity):
Die Frage ‘Warum’ blockiert oftmals das Annehmen einer Situation.
https://troet.cafe/@Minnasophie/109619420357312175
My translation to English: ‘The question ‘Why’ often blocks accepting a situation.’
I immediately reacted to this.
I thought back to the day a doctor diagnosed me with cancer. He saw a question I was about to ask and before I started to speak, he told me to not ask ‘Why’. He advised me to instead concentrate on how I wanted to deal with the situation.
That really changed my thinking. To help me with this, he asked whether I had any plans for the near to mid-term future, something that I wanted to achieve. This changed my thinking from intense worrying extremely to something I I could focus on.
I still worried about the treatment! But I also thought about any plans that I had. And indeed, there was one big plan that I did have: To give a keynote at Agile Testing Days 2018! I WANTED to do it. Badly.
I later realised, another good news that was hidden in the question about my plans for the future: Apparently the doctor thought I had a future, at least the chance to have it.
As it turned out, I was not able to give the planned keynote, since the therapy massively compromised my immune system and that meant I had to avoid larger crowds of people. During the traditional flu season, I was strongly advised to not meet more than 3-4 people at a time. And to avoid even that whenever possible.
Eventually, in 2019, I could give the keynote, and it was received well. Very well, indeed.
Now, having read that quote from above, I started to think about asking ‘Why’ – or even asking ‘Why’ five (!) times to dig into the cause of whatever one is investigating. There may be better questions or approaches. Is asking ‘How do we want to deal with this?’ a better way?
I can imagine that especially when trying to understand a situation that went bad, avoiding ‘Why’ may be a good idea. At least in German ‘Warum’ (of the similar terms ‘Weshalb’ or ‘Wieso’) already carries with it a tiny bit of shaming or (suspecting) guilt. This is something that one very likely wants to avoid, if the plan is to actually get to the root causes of a situation.
Given the learnings from my illness, I think the following question is an improvement on asking ‘Why?’:
How do we want to deal with this situation?
In my experience, asking ‘Why?’ often also involves ‘you’ as in ‘Why did you do X?’. This adds to the potential of shaming or assuming guilt: Now, there is also some separation between the one asking and the person being asked.
I had good experiences using ‘we’, when figuring out problems. Using ‘we’ signals that, in fact, we have a problem.
Using ‘We’ puts us on the same side of a task: we are facing the problem together. Therefore neither of us ‘is’ the problem (or maybe we all are), but… the problem is the problem.
Having made clear that this problem is our problem, we can collaborate to find a good solution. Even better, we might find three (or more) solutions and then select the best one for the given context, at that moment in time, and implement it.
This is related to Jerry Weinberg’s observation about understanding problems:
If you can’t think of at least three things that might be wrong with your understanding of the problem, you don’t understand the problem.”
Gerald M. Weinberg. Are Your Lights On?. Part 3 – What Is The Problem, Really?. https://leanpub.com/areyourlightson
Agile Testing Days 2022
It’s that season again: I attended the 2022 edition of the Agile Testing Days. There are already blog posts by Lisi Hocke ‘Agile Testing Days 2022 – The Unicorn Land We Build Together‘ and Stéphanie Desby ‘What I’ve learned at Agile Testing Days 2022‘. They already cover a lot of the remarkable sessions – and really, I think there’s no replacement to attend this conference in person. I’ll focus on the few things I find particularly noteworthy.
I arrived the day before the conference started and went to the gym & pool area first. After a 5½ hour drive through changing weather conditions (snow, fog, hail, sunshine, rain, more snow, sleet, and finally some more sunshine), this is just the right thing for me to shake off the stress.
Tutorial Day ‘Problem Solving with Agile Thinking and Practices‘ with Ben Linders
I very much enjoyed this well organised tutorial. Ben presented several way to find problems and then solve them. This included some role playing and games. What I appreciate: We got all the material needed to use the games in our projects as well as his ebook ‘Impediments – Problem? What Problem?’. That’s going to be so useful when applying the exercises in my projects – or playing the game with my teams (when I will meet teams in person).
The day was made even better, since I received the confirmation that I am booked for my next project. This is especially nice, since I have worked with the team already and like it a lot!
Day 1
I found Lily Higham’s talk ‘Testing the BBC World Service‘ exciting, since she explained how her team has to cover an incredibly large number of systems, languages and devices. One important insight: ‘Test with real devices’. Also remarkable: She noted how the BBC has to deal with being blocked in some countries and how, in some cases, professional smugglers help spreading the news anyway. No details about this were shared for a good reason. We were advised against trying the smuggling ourselves.
Dermot Canniffe presented ‘BDD And The Sleepy Developer‘, and made the point about the effects a sleep disorder can have during work incredibly well.
During the OpenSpace on this day we shared some information about Mastodon – and what to consider when joining it. My point of view: Two things are important:
- The server you chose
- The account name
While I didn’t use them in the Open Space, here are slides I prepared just in case:
For easy reference, here are the links used in the slides:
- https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/
- https://joinmastodon.org/servers
- https://instances.social
- https://fediverse.observer/list
As is a tradition by now the first day ended with a themed costume party. This year the ‘dress code’ was ‘Fairytales’. This is also the Award Night to celebrate MIATPP (Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person) of the year, this time won by Janet Gregory. Congratulations!
Day 2
On this day, I missed quite a few sessions I wanted to attend, since I held a workshop “Fast Feedback Using Ruby”. With about 10 people attending it was just the right size to help with the many things that can (and will) go wrong in a workshop where coding is a major part. Being (maybe over-) prepared helped a lot: While I had some material prepared to be downloaded, I knew (from experience in an earlier year) that conference WiFi may – or may not – work well. I now bring my own WiFi, so I have a back-up in case the conference one doesn’t work so well. I also had the downloadable material on a tiny small local web server – and a USB stick. Yes, I was over prepared, very likely.
In case you considered this workshop, but attended another session: There is an ebook(let) available on LeanPub, which covers the workshop. And there still are a few coupons let to grab it for free: https://leanpub.com/fastfeedbackusingruby/c/ATD-2022. Additionally there is a GitHub repository at https://github.com/s2k/fastfeedbackusingruby_workshop. The slides from the workshop are available as Fast Feedback Using Ruby slides.
The day ended with the first ‘AgileTD book fair‘ and the ‘Digesting Poets Society‘. I had the pleasure to present ‘Software People … Work From Home — Insights & Experiences From Planet Earth‘, a free ebook to which contributors from (so far) 28 countries and 33 authors provided text about life during the pandemic. Only while I was talking to some of the new readers, I realised that this wasn’t a writing task for me (I still have to add my contribution), but a project management job. Organising so many people from so many countries was – and still is – some work, but oh what a pleasure, too.
Day 3
What I remember from this day most of all, is what Stéphanie Desby shared with me about her break from – and return to working in tech. I find it super interesting what leads people to leave tech, at least for a while, and then come back. As I had to leave tech for while myself, that’s probably no too surprising.
An Afterthought
I remember that in some (pre-pandemic) years, the conference covered the whole week, either with 2 tutorial days, or 4 conference days. While I thought the conference should move back to this longer format, now I’m not so convinced anymore. 4 full days with a LOT of input, talking and, yes, having fun, is demanding.
That said: I am already looking forward to the Agile Testing Days 2023! 🦄🌈
Another Way to Write Ruby Code
Disclaimer: I am not suggesting to change the Ruby style guide.
At a workshop I was giving a few years ago, someone not used to writing Ruby code found an interesting way, that you can write Ruby code.
First let’s assume a class Thingy, that doesn’t do anything useful. It’s just needed to demonstrate the way to write Ruby.
Assume this is in file ‘thingy.rb’:
# frozen_string_literal: true
# Thingy is only used to demonstrate
# a way of writing Ruby code
class Thingy
def initialize(*args)
@args = args
end
def this(other)
@args << other
self
end
def that(*other)
@args << other
self
end
def content
@args
end
end
Now, let’s use this class in another script, that’s showing the alternative way to write Ruby code (in file use_thingy.rb):
# frozen_string_literal: true
(require_relative 'thingy')
part = (Thingy.new 'String', :symbol, Math::PI)
(p ((part.this 'Wahoodie?!').that :huh, Math::E).content)
Notice that rather LISP-like way to parenthesise, in line 7 in particular. I still am surprised that this is possible in Ruby and actually behaves the way I’d expect.
Running that script yields the following output:
> ruby use_thingy.rb
["String", :symbol, 3.141592653589793, "Wahoodie?!", [:huh, 2.718281828459045]]
It’s also entertaining that Rubocop does not complain about this code:
> ls
thingy.rb use_thingy.rb
> rubocop .
Inspecting 2 files
..
2 files inspected, no offenses detected
This is one of the reasons I like programming in Ruby so much: One can discover new ways (even if probably not very useful ones, sometimes) even after years of using it.
In case you’d like to experiment with this code: It’s on GitHub: https://github.com/s2k/alternative_way_to_parenthesise_in_ruby
